Cold War - Jerome Preisler [9]
She took a couple of sharp, agitated breaths.
Scarborough waited. He could hear the engine purring. It sounded like an eager jungle cat.
“All right,” she said. “I’m with you.”
He saw her start to tremble, reached out for her hand, held it. “When we stand up, put your arms above your head. And keep them there. Okay?”
Bradley nodded.
“Don’t let go of me,” she said. “I can do this. But don’t let go.”
Scarborough eased his head above the edge of the rock. The vehicle had stopped not five feet away, its crew facing him in impassive silence. Sunlight glinted off the four racked headlamps on its impact bar. He tried to keep his eyes off the machine guns positioned above them, off Payton’s limp body on the ground below. Tried to tunnel his gaze onto the man in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t sure he could continue suspending his panic otherwise.
“We’re American researchers!” he shouted. “We have no weapons!”
More silence except for the steady idling hum of the vehicle’s engine.
Scarborough swallowed past a lump in his throat. “Do you understand? We’re unarmed!”
There was another tick of silence. Then the LSV’s driver turned to the man in the passenger seat, spoke to him in a language Scarborough didn’t understand, turned back toward the outcrop.
“Move away from the rock,” he said. His English was thickly accented. “Now.”
Scarborough looked at Bradley. He could feel her fingers pressing into his hand through its double layer of gloves, and tightened his own grip.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“Ready.”
The two of them rose, slowly, their arms raised high, his right hand still clutching her left. Then they stepped out from behind the outcrop.
“Stop where you are,” the driver said, studying them. “Turn toward me.”
They complied with his orders, hands linked above their heads, sharing their strength, their courage, facing their unknown attackers together.
That was the way they were standing when the man in the passenger seat trained the long black barrel of his machine gun upon them and also did precisely as he’d been ordered.
TWO
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA MARCH 1, 2002
WITH ITS ARCTIC-BLUE BODY, CORAL SIDE COVES, AND beige vinyl interior, the ’57 Corvette roadster was the car of Pete Nimec’s dreams. A bolt of glorious inspiration captured in streamlined fiberglass and a classy flourish of chrome, delivering decisive 283 dual-four-barrel go without showoff extravagance. Just over six thousand of them had hit showroom floors across the USA, and just under two hundred were pumped with Ramjet fuel injection, a handful out of a scarce, exquisite handful that were still around and running a half century later.
A ’57 Corvette fuelie. Reconditioned to its original Chevrolet standards, including minor production-line imperfections. Probably worth upwards of a hundred, a hundred fifty thou, assuming you could find one for sale or auction.
And it was Nimec’s.
Which is to say, he owned it outright.
Owned it from the crossed-flag badge over its toothy front grille back to the big twin exhaust pipes at its tail. Owned it from the removable hardtop down to the wide whitewall tires. Owned it, his dream car, and by surprise no less, having received it at his condominium with a decorative red bow and handwritten note of appreciation taped to its wraparound windshield, an unexpected present from the man he admired most in all the world.
On any other morning, Nimec would have been in an unsinkable state of bliss. And he had been while driving to UpLink’s Rosita Avenue headquarters with his Wonderbar dash radio tuned to an oldies station, while pulling the ’Vette into his reserved underground parking slot, while riding the elevator to his office on the twenty-fifth floor.
But now that mood was heavy and flat, punctured by a single click of the mouse next to his computer.
He checked his watch as his telephone bleeped. Nine o’clock. Gordian would have already arrived at work.
“Nimec,” he answered.
It